Better design will attract more diverse players, says CCP

According to David Reid, CCP Games' chief marketing officer, 96 percent of the people subscribing to his company's flagship MMO EVE Online are male.

That's crazy high.

Despite only comprising a meager four percent of the user base, women aren’t entirely unrepresented in EVE Online. Ali Aras, for example, is the online name of a woman currently serving as vice-secretary of EVE’s eighth Council of Stellar Management, a player-elected committee that liaises between developers and players.

Still, EVE Online’s gender ratio is overwhelmingly, if not surprisingly, dominated by men, even compared to other MMOs. In a paper for Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, researcher Nick Yee presents the result of a multi-year survey of over 40,000 MMO players: roughly 15% of them are women.

If EVE Online were trending with the broader landscape of MMOs, we should expect to see almost four times as many women than are currently subscribed.

“I think we have to be realistic about what EVE Online is,” says Thor Gunnarsson, vice-president of business development at CCP. “Science fiction-themed worlds tend to attract men.”

In a separate interview, EVE senior producer Andie Nordgren echoes Gunnarsson’s explanation, almost verbatim: “Part of it is due to the theme of the game. Science fiction is an extremely male-dominated domain,” she tells me.

If EVE Online’s hard-nosed sci-fi trappings have been a stumbling block for women players, CCP is hoping that the supernatural horror of World of Darkness, an in-development MMO based on White Wolf’s Vampire: the Masquerade series, proves more alluring. World of Darkness centers on the interpersonal drama and large-scale politics of a group of vampire clans, set against a gritty, urban backdrop.

“When White Wolf was really the rock star of the pen-and-paper games industry, what they did was they created a fiction setting that, back in the day, had an almost equal gender balance,” Gunnarsson explains. “That was unheard of in tabletop gaming, and we’re certainly hoping to achieve something similar with World of Darkness in the future.”

“The genre lends itself towards having a female population,” senior producer Chris McDonough explains. “When we were making Vampire: the Masquerade, you’d go to conventions and events and there was a significant number of women in that audience.”

“Will there be more women interested in this than in EVE? The answer is yes.”

It’s not enough to chalk the dearth of women playing EVE Online to their perceived distaste for science fiction, though: the game’s accessibility, interface, complexity, and design are also at fault. “There’s bad complexity in EVE,” Nordgren tells me bluntly. “Only a certain type of person will ever work their way through it, and the majority of those people are guys.”

One example of bad complexity she gives is that new players often don’t have access to the information they need to understand the game’s mechanics. “We have those kinds of accessibility problems that we’re working on,” she explains, “and I think if we can shift some of this bad complexity out and just keep some of the good, interesting, challenging complexity, then we should get more female players as a result of that.”

However, “It’s not a goal for us as a development team to specifically increase the number of female players,” Nordgren says. Having a broader and more balanced fanbase would be a by product of good design, “more an indicator than something strive for.”

McDonough and his team are taking a similar tack with World of Darkness. Referring to his work on Vampire: the Masquerade, he explains that his team "never made a product that catered or specifically targeted women; we made a product that we thought would appeal to all gamers.”

“Women are gamers just like everybody else, and our role isn’t to specifically point a product at them, but instead to make a product that we think satisfies a lot of different player-types,” he continues. “And when women fall into that player-type, that’s fantastic, and we think there will be some in World of Darkness.”

timeline following:⇓ EVE Online

The developers at CCP face a unique challenge with EVE Online that other studios don't necessarily face. Its players expect an incredibly deep and detailed experience, which means that evolving the game is particularly d...more

The EVE Online keynote at Fanfest 2015 just wrapped up, and one of the major themes was that CCP wants to put more power in the hands of the players. A popular way of accomplishing this is by finally releasing unique shi...more

Greetings from Iceland, Internet dwellers. I'm in a hotel room in Reykjavík eating a pepperoni dog and drinking a ginger beer. Someone wrote a super friendly message on the wall just outside my window. There's a handle...more

You know what seems like a sound strategy for getting robbed? Try taking $1,500 cash out of the bank and transporting it elsewhere by walking down the street at night and waving that money in everyone's faces. Oh yeah, do all...more

CCP holds a few events for fans of EVE Online every year. Alongside Fanfest in Iceland, EVE Vegas is one of the major spectacles and it's kicking off today. If you aren't fortunate enough to be in Sin City to celeb...more

Pilots in EVE Online might feel like they're on top of the world when they're flying their spaceships through the galaxy, but if they want the full and authentic treatment, they have to make a voyage to Iceland for Fanfe...more

EVE Online has one of the most dedicated communities in all of videogames, and CCP is reciprocating that with some dedication of its own. Whereas most massive multiplayer online titles have a few large updates a year at ...more

So wow, here's a crazy story. CCP is erecting a real goddamn monument dedicated to their entire player base in Reykjavik, Iceland. It will "honor those who have participated in establishing the massive virtual universe."
The ...more

EVE Online, your world is so goddamn fascinating.
So, here's the story straight from CCP Games. The N3 coalition made up of the Pandemic Legion, Nulli Secunda, Insdious EMpire, and other smaller groups missed a bill payment f...more

I love CCP. They are a bunch of crazy guys, and every time they come out with a video it's always bizarre and amazing. To celebrate the holiday's in EVE Online, the guys at CCP are giving out in-game gifts on an advent calan...more

Ah, time travel. It's a staple of science fiction, and Star Trek has played host to more than a few yarns about tripping the light chronologic. Thus it's not unusual to see a few time-travel quests lodged into MMORPG Star Tre...more

The Elder Scrolls Online did a reboot of sorts earlier this week and the game is now subtitled Tamriel Unlimited. Gamers interested in the buy-to-play, no-subscription-fee version of the game can grab any old retail copy and ...more

Final Fantasy XI is 13 years old. As is the case with 13-year-olds, Square Enix is getting a bit sick of dealing with it.
The PS2 and Xbox 360 versions of the MMO will shut down in March of 2016. Final Fantasy XI's main...more